Get an Overhead Water Tank into InfraWorks 360

In a recent InfraWorks training for a water services company there was need to show a water tank in the InfraWorks model. You can achieve that in the following two ways:

Option 1

For a non-elevated ground level water tank, you can use the Point of Interest > 3D Model > Shapes > Green Solid 1M Cylinder. It doesn’t have to be green, this was the first in the list. You can also use this for oil tanks in an oil refinery.

This is a simple process – follow the numbered steps from the figure above. You may need to scale the model after insertion as needed.

Option 2

For an elevated water tank, you can import a 3D model from Sketchup warehouse. This website has known landmarks such as Golden Gate Bridge as well as some generic models uploaded by the community. Search for a model that is appropriate for your job. Once you have found a model that works, simply download the latest version of the model as an SKP file.

Drag and drop the SKP file inside your model in InfraWorks. A dialog box pops up in InfraWorks asking you to use cloud account to process the import and then another one that says that the materials might not be imported. Accept the defaults and click okay at both the prompts – we will address the material issue at the end of this write up.

The next step is to configure the model. Simply double click the model in the Data Sources panel (as highlighted in red in the figure above) to display the Data Source Configuration dialog box.

Then follow the numbered steps to specify the model Type as Building and click Interactive placing… The dialog box will hide; double click to place the object in the model.

After that the Data Source dialog box will appear again – click Close & Refresh. That completes the process. Notice, I did not fret about the units of coordinates.

Now the object does not have any material or texture. To fix this you will need to open the SKP file in Sketchup and export the object to DAE file from Sketchup. Then you will need to make sure all supporting files including the DAE file are in the same folder. Now you can drag and drop the DAE file into InfraWorks instead of SKP file.

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Gaurav Bagga

Gaurav Bagga
Senior Application Specialist Infrastructure

Gaurav is a Senior Application Specialist for Infrastructure Solutions at Ideate based out of San Francisco. He has over 18 years of experience in construction and related software industry. With this extensive design technology background he helps engineering and surveying companies, federal and state government agencies, and ENR 500 firms critically analyze and improve their construction drawing production process. He implements Civil infrastructure design technology led by InfraWorks and Civil 3D and has helped Ideate grow Civil Infrastructure Services. Being an industry recognized speaker he has presented cutting edge design technology at several industry conferences such as Autodesk University. Find Gaurav on Twitter.